Buyer's Guide - Mid-Range, January 2005
by Jarred Walton on January 21, 2005 11:09 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Hard Drive Recommendations
We have already said a lot on the topic of hard drives in our past Guides, and there really isn't a whole lot to add at this point in time. Higher capacity models are on the way in the not too distant future, but they will carry with them higher price tags. We recommend SATA drives for most people these days; vendors price them similarly to IDE and it is easier to route the cables. If you're into extreme overclocking, however, IDE may be worth considering. Performance isn't all that different - barring the lack of certain high-end options - and many systems have difficulty reaching top overclocked speeds with SATA drives. For nForce3 250 chipsets, we have found that SATA ports 1 and 2 are more likely to have problems than ports 3 and 4. So, unless you want more than two SATA hard drives, you should be fine.
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Hard Drive Recommendation
Seagate 160GB SATA with NCQPrice: $105 Shipped
The best value in terms of price per GB of storage currently goes to the 250 GB Hitachi drive [RTPE: HDS722525VLAT80], at just under 55 cents per GB. 250 GB is a lot of storage, however - probably more than most people really need. With the added benefit of Native Command Queuing (NCQ), the Seagate drives continue to impress. The Seagate 160 GB SATA [RTPE: ST3160023AS] offers the best value of the bunch, at roughly 70 cents per GB, but you also get a longer 5 year warranty. Samsung is a slightly better bargain, so if you don't think NCQ is worth paying extra, you can pick up the 160 GB Samsung for $15 less. We give the recommendation to the Seagate drives, although all of the others that we listed are reasonable alternatives.
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Hard Drive Alternatives
Maxtor 300GB SATA with NCQ and 16MB cachePrice: $194 Shipped
Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA with TCQ and 10,000 RPM
Price: $177 Shipped
On the other hand, if improved performance is what you're after, the best two choices are either one of the 16MB cache Maxtor drives or the 74GB Western Digital Raptor [RTPE: WD740GD] with its 10,000 RPM design - the Maxtor also offers NCQ while Raptors "only" offer TCQ, in case you were wondering. For storage space as well as performance, we would go with a Maxtor drive, as they are available in 250 and 300 GB models. If you're going to get a drive that large, we would go with the 300 GB model [RTPE: 6B300S0] for the small price increase - 65 cents per MB is pretty good, especially considering the larger cache. If raw speed is your primary concern, the faster rotational speed of the Raptor still wins out, but it is one of the few non-SCSI drives to actually cost more than $1 per GB. Again, we recommend the larger version for its improved performance and features over the original Raptor, but at $177, it costs $2.40 per GB. These drives are great choices, and only you can decide whether raw speed or increased storage is more important, so we recommend them both.
You could even go with a RAID 0 configuration for a possibly small increase in performance, or if you're concerned about data loss, there's the possibility of RAID 1. For a truly high-end setup, you might even think about getting three or more drives and a separate SATA controller with hardware support for RAID 5. That combines the best of both worlds, but it's more than what anyone actually needs. If you're looking into RAID 5 options, make sure that you pick up a controller card with a hardware XOR engine to calculate the parity checks, or else performance will be greatly reduced. RAID of any form is generally a high-end option, however.
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Rocket321 - Saturday, January 22, 2005 - link
Could someone explain what has changed between the NEC 3520A and 3500A. I checked the Anandtech Fall 16x roundup and it has the 3500A listed as DVD-R 16x.Dranzerk - Saturday, January 22, 2005 - link
Mmm, i bought my 930sb from Newegg about 6 months ago, guess they ran out fast. Oh well. :(N3cr0 - Saturday, January 22, 2005 - link
Well, I think I may go with the system described with the ASUS board but a 3000+ processor to save some cash. As it stands right now, anything is an upgrade from my Celeron 1.2 system. The XFX 6600GT is also available for dramatically less then the Leadtek (40-50$ less) 6600GT, so I'm going to be going with that also.Zebo - Saturday, January 22, 2005 - link
"The Diamond Pro 930sb Mitsubishi monitor is also a excellent CRT choice for 19inch."Too bad no one sells it:(
Zebo - Saturday, January 22, 2005 - link
KILLER CHOICES!!!'Another good mobo is epox 9NDA3J... it's $45 less than MSI..same clocks many say better with new bios. I post at 330 HTT now vs 315 before.. My mem OCs much more too..
JarredWalton - Friday, January 21, 2005 - link
20 - NEC and Mitsubishi "merged" on the monitor segment. The NEC FE991SB is almost the same monitor as the Diamond Pro 930SB. The 930SB did have a few advantages, like a 110 KHz hoizontal scan rate and a slightly higher max resolution, and perhaps a few cosmetic differences.Unfortunately, the 930SB is no longer available online as far as I can tell (and it did cost a bit more). That's why it's no longer in the Guide. If you can find one, it's still a great monitor, although I wouldn't pay much more than $285 for it.
Dranzerk - Friday, January 21, 2005 - link
The Diamond Pro 930sb Mitsubishi monitor is also a excellent CRT choice for 19inch. Very nice monitor, gets great reviews, and cheap to boot.I beleive it used to be Anandtech buyers guide..maybe another type? check it out
JarredWalton - Friday, January 21, 2005 - link
#17 - certainly something to think about, although there are so many possible causes that a lot of people don't tend to list in forums. For example, are they overclocking? What sort of PSU are they running (as a 300GB three platter hard drive inherently uses more power than an 80GB one platter drive)?Most of the posts seem to be related to having RAID issues. I won't even get into the subject of RAID, but having two of those drives running is going to further increase the power demands. What sort of GPU do they have, CPU, etc.? People looking at running two or even three $200 drives are probably putting in other high-end hardware as well, and a 480W PSU - even a quality Antec, Enermax, etc. - may not be able to handle the power demands.
Anyway, the Maxtor is merely listed as an alternative. Plenty of people are using them without any problems, but they're also not using two of them in most instances.
PrinceGaz - Friday, January 21, 2005 - link
Those are a truly excellent set of recommendations for systems in that price-range, Jarred. Compared with your first few guides which I considered to have quite a few poor choices; I read through this guide from start to finish, and without exception either agreed with your choices or would have went with something so close it made no real difference.I'm very close to building an nForce4/A64 box and regularly looking at my options (the only thing I'm waiting for now is the E0 A64 revision), and at some points what you wrote was so close to my own thoughts that I almost felt as if I was reading something I'd written myself!
The only bone I'd pick is with SLI. I'll probably get an SLI board, but not for the SLI capability but because they tend to have more PCIe sockets generally if you run in non-SLI mode and treat the second x16 as a x1. I'll never buy another legacy PCI card, so the two PCI cards I already have are all I'd ever want to put in a new PCIe system, therefore the more PCIe sockets it has the better. The MSI Neo4 SLI board fails miserably in that respect as it has no PCIe slots at all apart from the two x16 slots, so at most you can put a single PCIe x1 card in. I hope MSI gets suitably slated in the forthcoming review because of that.
mad nebraskan - Friday, January 21, 2005 - link
With all due respect, the recommendation of the Maxtor 250GB drive in combination with the MSI Neo2 MB might not be a good one. I helped a friend who had serious issues trying to get a RAID 0+1 to work using this board. We finally gave up and bought Raptors. A quick search of the net found this forum:http://forum.msi.com.tw/thread.php?threadid=63105&...
Now, the problem might be fixed with the latest BIOS, but I don't think it it.
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=368404
Just some thoughts from a guy who banged his head against this particular problem too many times.